Databases storing large amounts of data (e.g., a terabyte of data) are difficult to navigate. Some prior art database navigation techniques and data filtering techniques require large amounts of data to be downloaded. For databases in which the data corresponds to one or more dates, a calendar user interface is desired to simplify the navigation and reduce the amount of data downloaded during filtering.
Some prior art calendar user interfaces for filtering data lack the ability to enable or disable a range of dates for user selection even though most operations are valid only for a specific time limit. Further, an entire month cannot be selected by a single user selection in some prior art calendar user interfaces. In these interfaces, a user needs to individually select each day in the month to select the entire month. Similarly, some prior art user interfaces accept an unlimited quantity of selections from the user for filtering data. A large quantity of selections returns a large data set, thereby defeating the filtering attempt.
Some prior art user interfaces require dates to be entered in a specific format. For example, some calendar user interfaces require date entry in the form MM/DD/YYYY while other calendar user interfaces require date entry in the form DD/MM/YYYY. In addition, different calendar user interfaces may reference the months of the year by different names or abbreviations.
Calendar operations such as scheduling a job, an appointment, or automatically running a report each month with the same dates may need dates specified relative to a current date. The prior art calendar user interfaces lack the capability to allow a user to specify relative dates. For example, these prior art user interfaces do not provide the user the ability to specify the first week of each month, the first month of each year, or the first day of each month.
Although some existing calendar user interfaces are based on a hypertext markup language (HTML), they fail to provide options to the user to individually select non-contiguous days, individually select entire months, or specify dates relatively and have the relative dates converted internally to fixed dates. In other words, the user is often forced to sift through unwanted data.
For these reasons, a system for filtering data using a calendar user interface is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.